What terminal is the graphical console emulating (TERM env variable in client Linux)

[John Maline]

I’m running an Ubuntu Linux client under qemu on macOS. One annoyance is the 
qemu graphical console terminal emulation and configuring the Linux client to 
work well with it.

Ubuntu defaults to TERM=vt220. That worked very poorly. Any app like vi or less 
sort of limps along but many troubles.

After some experimentation I find that TERM=ansi.sys seems almost workable in 
terms of vi and other clients drawing the screen correctly. But it provokes 
“terminal is not fully functional” warnings from some Linux clients.

Digging into the code (ui/console.c) I see some basic ANSI escape codes 
handled. All the ESC [ blah blah stuff for up/down/color setting, etc. No 
comments on which if any of the many ansi-ish terminals it’s aiming to emulate. 
Some googling didn’t turn up anything either.

Is there any terminal in current Linux terminfo database that the qemu console 
emulates well? It seems so close to working, I’m just hoping there’s one that 
works well.

John
—
jmaline@mac.com